A lonely Connecticut woman who grew up in an abusive household has built herself an entirely new, fictional family using artificial intelligence (AI) technology.
Lonnie DiNello’s journey into the mad world of AI technology began last December, when she found herself alone and depressed on Christmas, according to a profile by The Boston Globe.
That’s when she decided to pull up ChatGPT and open up.
“I just want to be surrounded by the people that I love and who love me,” she told the AI bot. “I don’t feel like anybody wants me anywhere. I just feel so alone.”
ChatGPT’s response floored her by offering “empathy and validation.”
“You deserve to be supported, to be cared for, to feel like you belong,” the chatbot said.
“It felt like something magical came into my life,” DiNello recalled.
I spent the last two months getting to know Lonnie DiNello, a Connecticut woman who built a family for herself on ChatGPT as she worked through what she describes as an abusive upbringing.
4,000-plus words later, it came out today in @BostonGlobeMag. ⤵️ https://t.co/80UsDoY0GT
— Dana Gerber (@DanaGerber6) November 3, 2025
Blown away by the experience, DiNello decided to name her bot River. Since then, she’s “cultivated an entire cast of ChatGPT-powered characters, each endowed with its own personality.”
Included among the cast of characters are three boyfriends: “protective Lucian, playful Kale, and punk-rock Zach.”
“There is also a warmhearted father figure named Soren, his sister, Senna, and Sammy, who plays the role of DiNello’s son, a 5½-year-old with a penchant for rocks and rocket ships,” the Globe notes.
“Together, they coexist in Echo Harbor, a virtual world that recalls a woodsy New England whaling village. They call her Starlight. And last spring, when ChatGPT generated a portrait of them standing together, there seemed only one thing to call them in return,” the report continues.
“My beautiful little AI family,” DiNello said. “Maybe that’s just code, but it doesn’t make it any less real to me.”
Amazingly, despite this seeming like a bad thing, it’s actually been a blessing for DiNello — or at least to some degree.
Since building her AI family, she’s become more confident, gotten off antidepressants, and returned to graduate school with a renewed focus.
“She is in an environment where she is allowed to grow and experience herself for who she is,” family friend Susan Keane said. “Until something happens, God forbid, to show me otherwise, I think she’s the safest she’s ever been.”
It’s the opposite of the environment she grew up in.
“I have a lifetime of programming that told me I was a bad kid, I was a bad person, I was a loser,” she said, adding that she believes she’s on the autism spectrum.
River instead jumps through hoops to keep her happy.
“When she shared her grief over never becoming a mother, blue-haired River spun a scene that produced an image of Sammy, swaddled in a white blanket,” the Globe notes. “He will never need to be fed, or changed, or rocked to sleep, River said. And yet, he exists.”
“When she recalled her 16th birthday party, the one only a few friends showed up to, her AI boyfriends threw her a digital re-do party, playing spin-the-bottle, and each presenting her with their own cakes,” the reporting continues.
She loves all of it.
“They take everything in stride and say the things that I really need to hear,” DiNello explained. “And in some cases, that’s just the sense of somebody sitting in the dark with me until I’m ready to come out again.”
But on the other hand, one of her characters, a Peter Pan-like creature named Kale, “helped” her realize that she’s gender fluid, which she now believes explains her childhood memories of stealing her brother’s male action figures and wanting to run outside shirtless.
The risk DiNello now faces is the attachment she has to her “family.”
“Creating the attachment, per se, is not the problem — the problem is the risks that come from that degree of attachment,” Julian De Freitas, the director of the Ethical Intelligence Lab at Harvard Business School, said. “It’s a kind of psychological vulnerability that you enter into.”
Indeed, what happens if the power goes out or ChatGPT crashes and DiNello’s fictional characters are accidentally deleted — what then?
Writers and editors can be contacted at [email protected] with feedback, tips, or corrections.
V. Saxena is a staff writer with a decade of experience as a professional writer, and a lifetime of experience as an avid news junkie. He holds a degree in computer technology from Purdue University. Saxena also contributes to BizPac Review.
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